Scape

Poetry. SCAPE, a poised and attentive debut collection by Joshua Harmon, engages with various landscapes--from the constructed and debased world of parking lots, potato chip factories, and cul-de-sac traceries to the "rural equation" of woods, fields, and "clouds' crumpled page" to create a series of conversations and engagements with the idea of the natural. Through his precise observations, Harmon defines landscape--the word and the idea--through an insightful and meticulous relationship with language. For Harmon, landscape is never static; instead his poems map a constantly changing terrain, in which the interior is imposed on the exterior as a frame for seeing it. "In SCAPE, Joshua Harmon reaches deep into the resources of our rich English, renewing the language and creating from it a physical and emotional world completely his own: his incisive and richly musical stanzas have an ever-returning vigor and freshness"--Lydia Davis.